The topic we're discussing today is U.S. imperialism in Latin America.

And I like, I'll just start with something very subtle, but I think important.

The event is about U.S. imperialism and not the term American imperialism.

And this is an interesting topic for us, you know, in the United States, we call ourselves

Americans.

And there very much is this kind of Eurocentric, American exceptionalist mentality that sees

the so-called West as a political construct, because there's no reason that Western Europe

and the United States should actually be a coherent political block.

If you just look at pure geopolitics, that doesn't even make sense geopolitically.

The reason it's a coherent political block over the construction of 300 years of 200 to 300 years of U.S. imperialism, this project was integrating the United States

into this larger western block of capital. And of course, the United States was founded by

European colonialists who came to the modern-day Americas in order to colonize the land, steal the resources,

and exterminate the indigenous population.

At least those they didn't enslave.

They also enslaved the indigenous population.

So we need to understand that when we're talking about U.S. imperialism,

I'm glad we're saying U.S. imperialism, because the idea of the

Americas, even as a political project, is rooted within the European colonization of the so-called

Americas. This was an entire region, the United States going further south, that was victimized

by settler colonialism. And that was different from other

forms of European colonialism. I'm not in any way saying that it was that European colonialism was

somehow better in some way. I mean, obviously, I don't need to tell you all that there are millions

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